about 2 years I had raised a ?n of whether we have an Arduino Club here in the twin cities area. We had a few people reply to that thread indicating that they have the interest in being part of the club if someone were to start one. I looked for that thread to re-incarnate it and was able to find it. But, could not reply to that post. Not sure of that is locked down or what.

I don't know of an Arduino club but I do know there is a group called TC Makers with a Hack Factory in SE Minneapolis. I haven't been part of the group for a while but I'm thinking about signing up again. They are actually going to have an Arduino class today and another on the 15th. Check them out here;

Can everybody just first update their location first to indicate that we are all in the right state?!

I know a few forum ID's that are in the Twin Cities. There should be more with all the schools on Snelling but it's hard to bump into anyone even on the forum that's in the area. I read about TC Makers. I know there is another similar group. I can't remember if TC Makers is leaning more towards technology or arts compared with the other group. Care to share some comments about this group?

Bummer, we are not close to you. However, I am looking to involve high schools, universities and colleges in getting the word out about Arduino and have them host our meetings or hackfests/learning sessions in 2013. Let's take Arduino.MN on the road! If there's an educational institution that is near you and might be interested in hosting an Arduino event on a weekend or some other time during the week, I would like to speak with them. My contact information is at http://arduino.mn

So what's up MinnesotaEE in Mankato? I haven't been there since maybe 2009. The state university is pretty large. Was there used to be a tech company called Blue Earth technology or something? I bought some scrap circuit boards with their name on it. Took a few parts out of each board.

Where are you located? I am interested in the Arduino club, but it's a 3 hour commute for me. How's the turn out & do you know what the time extends to? -I noticed it doesn't start until 6 P.M.

Yes, I will be attending the University come September. Unfortunately, the grad rate is pretty low, so I am looking at another school to complete the last 2 years of my degree. The U of M is relatively expensive. I may look into NDSU.

I have only completed the required general education classes, so electronics are "new" to me. However, I've been hanging around the forums for the past few years, so I'm not totally lost:)

If you are interested in EE major, you have certainly skipped an option: Mankato,->U of M->->NDSU. What's that town between the Twin cities and Fargo/Moorhead?

I never was able to make it to the events. I am 3 hours round trip as well.

Most 1xx-2xx level electronics courses are not very interesting. You do circuit analysis on paper over and over, then breadboard circuits a lot. What arduino brings to the table is sensors and actuators and all the programming that makes a few separate pieces electronics into a system that does something. You will have to wait until 3xx level to get some similar enjoyment out of your formal ECE coursework, unfortunately. If you like Arduino, take plenty of programming courses. You might want to consider computer engineering, which is a major within most ECE departments. BTW, I don't know about electronics industry in ND but there are companies in the Twin Cities. It probably won't matter to hiring managers whether you get a degree in state or out of state but I imagine you get a bigger alumni network in Minnesota if you attend a school in Minnesota. Minnesota used to be the center of semiconductors before the silly-con valley. The next place with some EE work may be many states away, in all directions

Regarding the Blue Earth company, the boards dated back around 199x so maybe that company was long gone and their assets were sold and eventually made their ways to surplus stores such as Axeman surplus, which is where I picked up a few.

Alex only has a tech college so I was talking about Cloud. If you are interested in interfacing with hardware instead of maybe designing antennas or ICs, computer engineering is the way to go. You will need some programming but mostly for hardware. It is a degree offered by most Electrical and Computer Engineering departments (ECE). I heard that EE make more money but I am not in this field myself From an outsider's point of view, an EE could be an expensive screw/nut/gear in a corporate machine. They might be more specialized. If you want to start your own company, you need a lot of skills besides programming to make a product for a niche market. Trying to compete with the big fish is not possible. Say you envision "an underwater bamboo basket weaving machine" will be selling like hot cakes to those that wanted them but the big fish are simply ignoring them due to their small market size, you make it with off the shelf ICs and parts, write firmware for the weaving machine, and sell it. This involves a lot of programming and integration but zero skills in designing an IC. If this is the type of problem you would like to be solving, then find yourself in classes such as programming, mechanical engineering and even physics

I might feel better without the extended ice fishing season here but who knows? A job will find you and the job is where you go.

Not everyone is a team player type or likes to report daily to an intermediate supervisor and I can relate to that to some extent. If you want to be a future business owner, open source might be a good testing ground. No need to be a certified engineer to get started. All you need is a good idea or a solution to your own problem (others must have similar problem too unless you live on Mars). This will also hardly scale up to a full time job. You can do as much or as little while learning stuff and getting your degree. I think both sparkfun and adafruit were started by engineering students/grads with sparkfun's founder specifically trying to solve his own problem. Now sparkfun hires engineers for their own designs (you should see some of their old designs. I could do better).